Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE DESKTOP 10 SP2 - DEPLOYMENT GUIDE 08-05-2008 Deployment Manual page 833

46.4.2 Valid Username and Password Not
Accepted
This is by far the most common problem users encounter, because there are many reasons
this can occur. Depending on whether you use local user management and authentication
or network authentication, login failures occur for different reasons.
Local user management can fail for the following reasons:
• The user might have entered the wrong password.
• The user's home directory containing the desktop configuration files is corrupted
or write protected.
• There might be problems with the X Window System authenticating this particular
user, especially if the user's home directory has been used with another Linux dis-
tribution prior to installing the current one.
To locate the reason for a local login failure, proceed as follows:
1 Check whether the user remembered his password correctly before you start de-
bugging the whole authentication mechanism. If the user might not remember
his password correctly, use the YaST User Management module to change the
user's password.
2 Log in as root and check /var/log/messages for error messages of the
login process and of PAM.
3 Try to log in from a console (using Ctrl + Alt + F1 ). If this is successful, the blame
cannot be put on PAM, because it is possible to authenticate this user on this
machine. Try to locate any problems with the X Window System or the desktop
(GNOME or KDE). For more information, refer to
cessful but GNOME Desktop Fails "
cessful but KDE Desktop Fails"
4 If the user's home directory has been used with another Linux distribution, remove
the Xauthority file in the user's home. Use a console login via Ctrl + Alt +
F1 and run rm .Xauthority as this user. This should eliminate X authentica-
tion problems for this user. Try a graphical login again.
Section 46.4.3, "Login Suc-
(page 820) and Section 46.4.4, "Login Suc-
(page 821).
Common Problems and Their Solutions 817